The shake-up of the navy is the last chance for the government to regain credibility on defence

An evolved Hunter Class design for Australia’s next guided missile frigate. Picture: BAE Systems Australia

The shake-up of the navy’s surface ship fleet looms as a critical test for the Albanese government, which is struggling to retain its credibility on defence and national security.

This naval review represents the government’s best and perhaps last chance to prevent national security becoming a serious weakness at the next election after a series of mistakes, inaction, lethargy and a lack of commitment on defence.

The government needs a magic bullet to redeem itself after a shocking year where it did absolutely nothing to improve the parlous state of Australia’s navy, despite warning in its much-hyped Defence Strategic Review last year that Australia faced the most dire strategic outlook in generations.

In response to that review, Defence Minister Richard Marles was last year rolled by his cabinet colleagues, who provided no extra funding to defence, thereby revealing a government that simply wasn’t serious about national security.

Defence Minister Richard Marles with Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Mark Hammond. Picture: Justin Benson-Cooper/ The West Australian

This review provides a belated opportunity for the government to show it is serious about defence.

To do so, the review of the navy’s surface fleet must produce many more ships on the water with greater firepower more quickly than the slow-motion current plans that would not see the next new navy ship – the Hunter-class frigate – delivered until 2032.

It needs to be backed by a serious increase in defence spending, not the minor tinkering in spending we have seen so far, but a real commitment to new money inside the four-year budget forward estimates.

The shake-up of the surface fleet to be announced on Tuesday comes at least a year too late. There was no reason it could not have been released as a part of the DSR last year, but for some reason the government used that review to order yet another review by another independent panel.

That review was delivered to the government at the end of September, and now – almost five months later – the government has finally decided on its response.

In that time, China has commissioned about 21 warships.

The expected announcement of a new fleet of smaller warships – corvettes or light patrol frigates – is a belated but important recognition that the navy’s missile firepower is too low, having dropped by 43 per cent since 1995.

The new Hunter-class frigates will only accelerate the loss of firepower, because they have just 32 missile cells compared with the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, which carry 96 missile cells. That program can consider itself very lucky to survive this review, albeit in a shrunken form, with the number of ships set to drop from nine to six.

The expected new fleet of smaller warships, with large numbers of missile cells, will finally provide some teeth to the surface fleet. But these new ships must be brought into service as soon as possible.

This means the navy must learn to do what it hates doing – accepting a foreign ship design without tinkering with it to “Australianise it”. As we have seen with the Hunter program, which is a poorly tinkered version of the British Type 26 frigate, this only brings cost overruns, schedule delays and mystifying technical stuff-ups.

Australia should buy at least the first few of these smaller warships ready-made off the shelf from overseas because they will take too long to bring into service if all of these new warships are built in Australia.

This review gives the government the opportunity to do exactly the opposite of what it has done so far – take defence seriously by funding it properly and creating with a sense of urgency a more lethal and more nimble navy.